Blog by Lucy Courtenay

A Different Window

I’ve done it so many times that I thought I knew it all. Station, house, field, horse, horse, tiny horse (seriously, there are lots of horses, some extremely small) etcetera. But today, it was as if I’d never seen it before. And you know why?

I was looking out of the other window.

I realised this somewhere between a busy cement factory which had mysteriously sprung up overnight on a twenty-acre site and a brand-new silted-up canal, which must once have borne a host of slim and colourful boats taking coal somewhere that wasn’t Newcastle. Where were the tiny horses, I asked myself in some astonishment, and the two upside-down plastic chairs stuck mysteriously in the middle of their oft-admired field?

Revelation! I was on the other side of the train!

How bizarre, to discover something so completely new, which had been right there under my nose all along.

I was on the train today because I was going to the British Museum, to see the exhibition about the Hajj: the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims must take at some point in their lives. Incredible. Fascinating. And utterly unknown to me. I have clearly spent too much of my life on the white, western, Catholic side of the train.

Live dangerously, I say, and look out of the other window tomorrow. What’s the worst that can happen?